Risk Management Polling at Gartner Summit

Washington DC played host to the 2010 Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit this week. At the event, Gartner Research Vice President French Caldwell provided a new twist on audience interaction with live polling via cell phone texting. In his session titled “Selecting and Applying GRC Frameworks and Standards,’ French polled the audience on “which areas are you most likely to apply standards?” Not surprisingly, IT risk and IT security ranked highest followed by regulatory compliance and enterprise risk. With respect to ERM, French then asked, “which ERM standard is most commonly used in your company?” The largest response was “none!” Fortunately, this was closely followed by COSO ERM, custom or self-defined frameworks and ISO 31000.

In a separate, lively and entertaining session titled “Research Factory,” French moderated a panel of Gartner analysts in a close-up look at how Gartner analysts propose and debate the merits of a new research topic. French again polled the audience on which proposed research topic was most relevant and had the best chance/probability of being fulfilled. Each analyst had four minutes to propose their topic and defend the debunkers on the panel. When all topics were complete, the audience voted on who presented and defended their topic the best. The winner was Research VP, Jay Heiser who in his proposal contended that there is a strong likelihood of a failure/data loss from a SaaS product or Cloud Service in the next few years having a major business impact on its subscribers.

Regardless of whether Jay’s prediction comes to fruition, clearly a strong case can be made for a detailed risk assessment of your SaaS and Cloud Services data protection processes.

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